Earth is a big place. It contains Liberia and also Taylorsville, Utah.

Stan Johnson’s family made that move when Stan was in elementary school. A Martian might have found it easier.

“Plus, the other kids looked at me and thought I could play basketball,” Johnson said. “I hadn’t played anything but soccer. I was out there trying to kick it. I was the last player picked there for a while.”

“It’s the best of both worlds,” Johnson said. “It’s a great academic school and it’s in L.A., and there are a lot of players in L.A. “

Before 1988 and after 1991, the Lions have made two NCAA tournaments in their history. We all remember Hank Gathers, Bo Kimble and the 40-minute sprints that won 74 games for Coach Paul Westhead in three seasons. The next coach was Jay Hillock, who had two winning seasons and was replaced by John Olive.

The subsequent trail of tears is uninterrupted. Olive had one winning season in five years. Charles Bradley had none in three. Steve Aggers had none in five. Rodney Tention had none in three. Max Good had two in six. Mike Dunlap, as respected a technician as basketball has, had one in six. The “one” was a 22-12 season in 2019, but he couldn’t survive 11-21 in 2020.

Johnson is hailed by Bill Evans, his Southern Utah coach, where Johnson was an eventual captain and helped the Thunderbirds make their only NCAA Tournament appearance. He worked for Herb Sendek at Arizona State, Jim Boylen at Utah and Steve Wojciechowski at Marquette.

At ASU, he began recruiting a 5-foot-11 shooter from suburban Gilbert named Markus Howard. Sendek was fired after the next season, but Johnson went to Marquette and sold Howard, who ended the season as Division I’s leading scorer at 27.8 ppg.

“He was a little undersized,” Johnson said, “but the more we watched him, we saw how much he wanted it. He was a shooter who became a great basketball player. If I heard someone shooting in our gym late at night, I knew it was him.”

LMU does have its assets. It’s somewhat similar to UC Irvine, now a habitual winner. The difference is its neighborhood.

When Russell Turner left his assistant’s job at Stanford to take over UCI, he knew the Big West Conference had no dominant program. It’s not the West Coast Conference, which was ranked eighth among all conferences in 2020 and has a ceiling made of hard glass: Gonzaga, BYU and St. Mary’s.

What are the methods of excavating such a program, other than good hypertension medicine?

“You need to develop an identity that is consistent with your school,” Turner said. “You need a really good staff. You also need to make your holdover players know that they’re a big part of the program, that you’re not just going to run them off. When I got here, Michael Wilder and Adam Folker turned out to be building blocks.”

Turner says it’s important to mine the local talent, but not just yet. Ten years ago, an Orange County player who picked UCI was a contrarian who risked ridicule. That has changed with the winning.

“We started out trying to sign international players, and then we started working on sons of NBA players and coaches,” Turner said. “Gradually, we developed a reputation that helped us locally.

“But there’s a lot of places where you can be successful. I remember looking at St. Mary’s and thinking there’s no way anybody can win there. Then Randy Bennett took over (again, using global players) and made it one of the best programs in America.”

The key will be finding players from solid high schools, as Dunlap did when he signed Eli Scott from Chino Hills, and spotting talent that might not fit the “power conference” template. Grad transfers, or “bounceback” L.A. kids who might have run aground elsewhere, are also welcome.

But Johnson knows he’ll have to do this with negligible tradition, fan support or attention in this ever-bloated media market.

That’s when he thinks about his senior year, when he transferred from Southern Utah to Bemidji State in Minnesota, and became an assistant coach on a team that made the Division II playoffs.

“I loved being there, loved the people,” Johnson said. “But I’ll be honest: It was Antarctica. If you can win there, you can win anywhere.”

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